- [Instructor] We've seen how to provide illumination
with light objects
such as these photometric rectangle lights.
Another primary lighting method
is through the 3ds Max scene environment.
That environment can be anything from a flat color
to a high dynamic range panorama image
to a physical simulation of daylighting.
The simplest form of environment is a flat color.
So we'll start with that.
I'll launch active shade
so we can see an interactive production rendering
and we'll isolate the environment from all other lighting
by disabling the lights that we have in the scene.
I'll select one of those rectangle lights,
go to the modified panel and in the general parameters,
disable it by turning off the checkbox that's labeled on.
So turn that off and it turns off all of the lights
because they're instances.
I should also mention that our view port background
is set to the environment.
If we go to the views menu to viewport background,
we can see it set to environment background.
And because we have no environment yet,
we see no light in our viewport,
we do have F4 edge faces turned on so we can see the objects
but if we turn edge faces off with F4, it's black
just like our active shade rendering, okay.
I'll re-enable those edge faces with F4.
Let's now go into the info environment dialogue,
it's found in the rendering menu.
Rendering environment.
And we previously saw this window
when we looked at exposure control,
we've currently got an exposure value of six
and a white balance of 4,800 degrees Kelvin.
At the top of the environment and effects window,
we have the common parameters and the background
which is the environment.
We can choose either a flat color
or provide an environment map.
Let's start with a flat color.
So click on the color swatch that's currently black
and in the color selector, we can increase the value.
And as we do that,
we start to see some elite illumination
come through the windows in both active shade
and in the view ports, we can close that color selector.
The light coming through the windows looks very blue,
but it is actually white light.
We've got white chosen as our color.
The reason it looks blue
is because our camera exposure control setting
has a white balance of 4,800 degrees Kelvin.
If we switch this back to illuminant with a daylight 6,500K,
then we get neutral white light coming through the windows.
Okay, it's a bit overexposed.
We can increase the exposure value by one stop.
Let's bring that up to a value of seven
which reduces the sensitivity.
It brings it down to half and we have a pretty good exposure
here in our active shade window.
Okay.
Now let's combine this environment or ambient lighting
with the lights that we've created in the ceiling.
I still got one of those selected
and I can go over to the modified panel
and re-enable all the lights by turning this one on.
And we see now we're getting a combination
of our artificial and natural lighting.
We've got neutral D65 white light coming through the windows
and also 4,800 degree Kelvin light
coming from the ceiling lamps.
We can adjust the color temperature of the background
and also of the camera's white balance
in order to produce a more aesthetically pleasing result.
To do that, we want to apply an environment map
instead of this flat color.
So we're going to specify a specific color temperature
for that light coming through the window
using a black body map.
And so that we can see the difference,
let's clone this window that we've got currently.
Click on clone rendered frame window
and we can just minimize that so we can look at it later.
Let's set our ground color back to black.
Just bring its value down to zero.
And we'll add an environment map.
Click on the big button that's currently labeled none
and we get a new window we've never seen before
called the material map browser.
We want to navigate through here to choose the map we want.
We've got a maps category,
and then there's a subcategory OSL,
which stands for open shading language.
We want to go into the utility category
and we see black body, select that and click okay.
And we see some strange colors coming through our windows.
We'll need to adjust the parameters of the black body map
and that'll be done in the material editor.
So let's launch that for the first time.
Up here on the main toolbar, we've got the material editor.
Click that button and it launches up.
We need to drag the black body map over into the view
or the central area of the material editor.
Drag and drop that over there.
When you release the mouse, you get a popup window
asking if you want an instance or a copy.
If it's an instance,
then the thing that we're working on here
in the material editor will be the same thing
that is instanced into the environment.
So we're not making a copy,
we want to work on it directly.
So choose instance, click, okay.
And it's selected automatically.
And we see its parameters listed here.
Most importantly, we have the colors,
so we have a minimum and maximum value
listed in degrees Kelvin.
So let's play around with these.
If we want this to be less orange and more blue,
we'll want to increase these numerical values.
So we'll set the minimum value to 7,000 and press enter,
and that's on one side of the screen.
You also want to change it on the other side of the screen,
we'll set the maximum to 7,000 also and press enter.
And let's also reduce the intensity.
The light coming through that window is a bit too bright,
so we'll bring the intensity down to value of 0.5.
All right, we're done with the material editor.
We can call close that.
To put the finishing touches on this,
we can adjust our exposure and white balance.
let's bring exposure value down a little bit to 6.5.
That's a split exposure,
we've just brightened it up a little bit.
For the white balance, we can find a happy medium
between the 7,000 degree light coming through the windows
and the 4,800 degree light coming from our light fixtures.
Let's set our white balance back to a manual temperature.
We'll set that to 5,500 degrees Kelvin
which is the standard daylight setting
on a real world camera.
All right.
Now, we've got a really good balance here.
We've got realistic colors for the natural light
coming from the environment,
realistic colors for the artificial light
and a realistic value for our camera white balance.
And we can compare this to the previously saved image.
We've got to minimize down here,
we can bring that back up again.
Restore that.
So on the left we have our fine tune version.
On the right we have the version
before we set the color temperature of the background
and the white balance of the camera exposure.
That's how to apply a flat color to an environment
for a background and ambient lighting.